At once the wretched prisoner cries out that he signed the Declaration without reading it; that it was the work of a villain.
“Do you expect me to believe,” says James with contempt, “that you set your hand to a paper of such moment without knowing what it contained?”
Now Monmouth makes his final and most abject appeal. He who has been the champion of Protestantism, and has called men to arms against a Catholic king, now offers to be reconciled with the Church of Rome! The king, always eager to make converts, immediately offers his spiritual assistance, but not a word does he say of pardon or respite.
“Is there no hope?” asks Monmouth.
The king turns away in silence, and the prisoner rises from his knees. The bitterness of death is past; his craven weakness has gone; he leaves the room with a firm step. In the Tower he takes farewell of his children and of the brave wife who has reclaimed him from a life of vice. Then he goes to the block, and his head is hacked off by an executioner whose nerve has failed him.
Let the story of the ill-starred rising be told. Monmouth was the son of King Charles and Lucy Walters, the daughter of a Welsh Royalist. In his thirty-first year he was probably the most popular man in England, extremely handsome, and gifted with the most charming manners. His father had conferred all possible honours on him, and as there was a movement to exclude his Roman Catholic uncle James from the succession he had come to regard himself as heir to the throne. He had proved himself no mean soldier on battlefields in the Netherlands and in Scotland, where he had shown mercy to the vanquished. He neglected no opportunity of making himself popular with the people. “He stood godfather to the children of the peasantry, mingled in every rustic sport, wrestled, played at quarter-staff, and won foot races in his boots against fleet runners in shoes.”
His great claim, however, to the sympathy of the people was his staunch Protestantism. As a matter of fact, he had no settled religious opinions. His private life was bad, and his Protestantism was but a means to an end. He had taken part in a reckless plot towards the close of his father’s reign, and had been obliged to take refuge in the Netherlands, with a sentence of death hanging over his head. On his deathbed, when Charles blessed his children, his eldest and best-loved son was an exile and a wanderer. The dying king never mentioned his name.
James began his reign by promising to “preserve the government both in Church and State as by law established.” There was no opposition to him; men were ready to rely upon “the word of a king who was never worse than his word.” They remembered his good work at the Admiralty and praised his personal courage, while they hated and feared his religion. Really, James was a stronger and better man than Charles; but while the late king was witty, gracious, good-natured, and easy-going, James was dull, suspicious, sullen, and silent. A contemporary said, “Charles could have been a great king if he would, and James would have been a great king if he could.” While Charles cared nothing for religion, and would risk nothing for the Church which he favoured, James was a zealous Roman Catholic, and was prepared to risk his crown for the sake of his Church.
The Protestantism of the nation was soon alarmed. The king openly heard mass, and a week or two later the rites of the Church of Rome, after an interval of a hundred and twenty-seven years, were once more performed at Westminster. Then came a proclamation suspending the penal laws against Nonconformists, and thousands of prisoners, including the author of “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” were released. Parliament showed no anger; it was packed with the king’s friends. They granted James a most liberal income, which almost made him independent of further Parliamentary grants.
Meanwhile, Monmouth in Holland was busy hatching a plot to oust James and secure the throne for himself. His fellow-conspirator was Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll, the leader of the Covenanters who had suffered persecutions many and sore during the last reign. Two years after the Restoration Episcopacy had been re-established in Scotland, and more than three hundred ministers had given up their livings rather than conform. Severe fines were inflicted on all who dared to abstain from public worship in the parish churches, and troopers rode about the country cursing and swearing, harrying and plundering, wounding and killing to their hearts’ content. Many of the ejected ministers continued to preach in the open air, and their flocks, greatly daring, attended their secret ministrations. “Conventicles” increased daily in number. With a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other, the blue-bonneted Covenanters gathered on lonely hillsides for worship, while scouts kept watch for the coming of the dreaded troopers. Persecution at last drove them to arms. After a victory at Drumclog, they were utterly defeated at Bothwell Bridge, and a terribly cruel time of shooting and hanging, torture and transportation set in.